Embracing the dark side. Adam Brody, revealed exclusively to Us Weekly that he’s enjoying playing the part of “bad guy” Nick Talman on Crackle’s StartUp after four seasons spent as the lovably dorky Seth Cohen in the ‘00s on The O.C.
“It feels actually really good,” he told Us at the season 3 premiere of StartUp at the Tribeca TV Festival presented by AT&T in New York City on Friday, September 21. “It feels good being absolved of being likable, of trying to be likable … Oftentimes if I’m playing a likable character, and this person’s a hero, we need to constantly root for this person. Sometimes even in writing they’ll do something … a choice that I don’t agree with, and I’ll kind of go, ‘Listen, if you want to like this guy, I don’t think he can do this.’”
He continued, “But when I’m free of a person trying to necessarily be the hero, then all of a sudden, it’s like anything is fair game and I don’t have to make excuses … I can just lean [into] … whatever choices that character wants to make.”
While the StartUp producer, 38, doesn’t necessarily consider his character of Talman as a “morally bankrupt” person, he says he’s “halfway there.” “It’s more than anything physical. It’s the difference in moral choices they make as they go through life,” he added.
The actor also concedes that Seth Cohen wasn’t as sweet deep down as he’s perceived. “I think that even that character is only a hair’s breadth away from making an awful, selfish choice,” he said.
In fact, as Brody told Nylon in February in 2014, he thinks the fictional comic book author would be deceased by now. If I had to predict, I’d say Seth Cohen is dead,” he said at the time. “I think he’d be going down to Mexico and probably had a bad car accident. It wasn’t any fault of his own, but yeah, knowing what I know now about Seth and his poor decision-making, that’s my guess.”
Brody told Entertainment Tonight in June that he and wife Leighton Meester, who share daughter Arlo, 3, have an annual chuckle about their days spent playing their respective beloved characters of Seth and Blair Waldorf on the CW hit Gossip Girl. “Once a year, randomly, on our Seth and Blair day,” he joked. “It’s good for a laugh.”
In real life, the couple, who wed in secret in 2014, are more in love than ever: The actress, 32, referred to her husband as her “soulmate” in a new interview published on Friday, September 21. “I wouldn’t change anything [in the past] because I’m happy where I am now,” she told PorterEdit. “And I think that that’s one of the many wonderful parts of not only having a child and meeting your soulmate.”
Season 3 of StartUp premieres on Crackle on November 1.
With reporting by Marc Lupo
